This collection of interwoven essays guides the reader through the
thoughts of Stanley Cavell since his retirement from regular teaching.
The reader unfamiliar with his earlier work is fortunate that Cavell
perpetually feels the need "to introduce myself intellectually
[…] Call this need my identification with the stranger, even,
as Emerson almost says, with the immigrant." A very particular
constellation of texts have been the spur to Cavell's thought over an
extended period. The names of the thinkers to whom Cavell constantly
returns include Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Heidegger, as well as Henry James, William
Shakespeare, the great operas, and the great cinematic comedies and
melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s. All these sources figure prominently
in this latest collection, which wanders from one to another with the
appearance of carefree celebration, leading the inattentive reader to
risk missing that this is just as much if not first of all a matter
of being perpetually unsettled.

What more than anything ties the collection together is indeed a preoccupation
with being unsettled on the one hand, and on the other hand being able
to celebrate. Cavell spells these as the threat of "skepticism,"
and the ability of "praise" to guard against this threat (3).
"Skepticism" might seem to name a particularly uninteresting
way into philosophy: the overly logical or absurdly abstract contention
that existence as such is without proof or certainty. This,
of course, describes the Cartesian method of doubt and the foundation
of modern philosophy. But the skeptical possibility places into doubt
not only the existence of the world but of myself. What Descartes insists
upon is less the famous cogito ergo sum so much as the fact
that by saying "I am" I not only assert but make
my own existence (a fact). [1]
Taken in this way, the anxiety behind skepticism is brought to the fore:
what if I do not say, or cease to say, "I am"? Do
I then cease to exist; does my existence become thereby less certain;
is this the modern condition? Abstract philosophical accounts of or
denials of skepticism are in fact only the reflection of this contemporary
skeptical anxiety.

Cavell leaves open whether skepticism has historical conditions, that
is, whether it begins with Descartes or is simply the consequence
of belonging to that species that has fallen into the possession of
language (140). In the ancient world, he notes, philosophy, including
skeptical philosophy, was not a question of theory but a way of life,
and Cavell asks, first of all, whether such a way of life is livable
and, secondly, whether today any other way of life is livable
(27). And yet Cavell does not shirk from also wondering whether our
contemporary condition poses to us the possibility that skeptical anxiety
may be disappearing, with our increasing capacity to accommodate without
fuss to the evanescence and inexpressiveness of everything (140). And
"everything" here includes other minds, skepticism toward
which Cavell variously describes as "my denial or annihilation
of the other" (150) and as the "drive to the inhuman."
[2] Such an event would be
the triumph rather than the overcoming of the skeptical attitude and,
we might add, the end of the (human) future.

If skepticism is irreducible, that is, if human existence irreducibly
haunts the world, how does celebration or praise guard against
this threat? One way into this question is via Nietzsche's invocation
of the man of "tomorrow and the day after tomorrow," from
which Cavell gains his title. In a world where existence has the condition
of haunting, Nietzsche thematizes the philosopher as the wanderer, the
free spirit whose thought is directed not by today but by tomorrow,
or not by tomorrow morning but by something which he calls, evocatively,
Übermorgen. Cavell draws this back to Nietzsche's praise
of Emerson, and to Emerson's thought that there is always "another
dawn risen on mid-noon," and thus to the disconcerting (to philosophers)
link between Nietzsche and Emerson that can be called "cheerfulness"
(118).

From out of all this Cavell is brought back to what has been perhaps
his central thought, that of "moral perfectionism." From the
moment Socrates, the wanderer, thinks philosophy as the dialogue of
disagreement over the difference between the honorable and the dishonorable
- that is, not as an evaluation of particular deeds as good or bad but
rather an evaluation of ways of life in terms of whether they
are worthy of praise - from that moment moral perfectionism finds its
ground of possibility. This is written, in Emerson, as the aspiration
to "our unattained but attainable self," that is, to a thinking,
a wandering, a way of life that is capable of praise not on the terms
of today's haunted shadow-life, but rather in terms of a philosophy
which will not arrive until a new dawn rises to cast existence in a
new light (120). What is worthy of praise today, then, what must be
praised, is that which strives to forge a path toward, or strives to
consent to embark on the journey toward, that land which is nowhere
here yet will not be anywhere other than where we are right now (which
is why, again following Emerson, Cavell is likely to call this place
"this new yet unapproachable America," that is, that America
which he has consented to and awaits the arrival of). [3]

Such a mode of thinking might be thought to run counter to today's
hegemonic attitude that prefers to keep its feet planted resolutely
on the ground, or might on the other hand be thought to contain affinities
to a thought that thinks democracy, if it means anything, always means
democracy "yet to come." But what has this to do with film?
Everything, says Cavell. The perfectionisms of Plato and Aristotle,
for all that they still may have to teach us, were the domain of the
privileged (121). What Cavell cares about is the democratization of
perfectionism (which would also be a necessary step toward the perfection
of democracy). Carrying out the democratization of perfectionism means
struggle, even combat, and if Nietzsche and Emerson are in the vanguard
of this struggle, it is in the cinema that the battle has most
publicly been waged, for reasons that are intrinsic to cinema,
that still new art form and technology, and intrinsic specifically to
popular cinema.

This must be clarified: it decidedly does not mean Cavell is praising
or calling for a cinema of "headline moral issues," neither
John Sayles nor Ken Loach. He thinks firstly, rather, of what he calls
the great "comedies of remarriage" (The lady Eve,
His girl Friday, The awful truth, etc.), to which
he devoted a deservedly well-known if under-appreciated book. [4]
In these films the protagonists are inevitably far from perfect and
rather too urbane to probe overly deeply or sincerely into their own
souls or morality. What have they to do then with moral perfectionism?
Cavell's case is that, inhabiting a very modern (urban) world, a skeptical,
haunted world, an imperfectly democratic world - that is, our
world - these are movies and characters that can no longer rest easy
with marriage, that is, living together, conceived as an ideal to be
attained but never shown. The romantic comedy that ends
in marriage implies legitimating the world today by agreeing never to
examine the married world coming tomorrow.

Comedies of re-marriage, on the other hand, all move in one
direction, from the threat of divorce toward the re-affirmation
of life together and life tomorrow, with the knowledge and awareness
that today's reaffirming decision does not mean the same threat might
not have to be faced tomorrow or next week. The praise the characters
in the end find themselves capable of offering one another is no inoculation
against the threats of a skeptical world, but it contains the acknowledgment
that by consenting to offer it they are giving themselves the best possibility
of inventing for each other their own intimate, singular, way
of life. And in the end what holds for a couple - that being together
means being constantly open to the possibility of requiring reaffirmation,
that is, to reinventing without a road map the form of their collective
life - holds just as well for a nation that aspires to consider itself
a democracy. In both cases the possibility of giving such reaffirmation
and consent relies upon the possibility of acknowledging a genuine wish
to do so and finding a form of words capable of expressing this wish,
that is, on the possibility of being able to offer authentic praise.

Given this account, what is interesting is that in this latest work
Cavell's most detailed consideration of a film is concerned very much
with what may be considered headline moral issues, even if the film
which provokes him to such considerations could hardly have been predicted.
The film is Vincente Minelli's The band wagon (US, 1953), and
the issue is race, which Cavell describes in the American context in
as succinct a form as I have read:

For America communism was never as real a specter haunting the United
States as the presence of blacks, with their standing, perpetual reminding,
or mocking, of its blunted promise of equality, unfinished business.
(108)

In "Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise" the question
asked is not whether something, in this case the heritage of black dancing,
is worthy of praise, but of who has the right to offer it. Cavell is
responding to a prior reading by Michael Rogin of the number "A
Shine on Your Shoes," a reading that asserted that, if this is
Fred Astaire's acknowledgment of what he has himself inherited from
black tap, it is acknowledgment as domination, thus acknowledgment
that in its very way of being given reproduces the domination that first
made it possible for a dancer such as Astaire to exploit this inheritance
and at the same time to occlude it.

It is not possible here to demonstrate the subtlety of the reading
by which Cavell contests Rogin's reading: expressed most generally he
shows that the acknowledgment played out in the number itself thematizes
the very domination of which it stands accused. The scene takes place,
it will be recalled, in an amusement arcade that might variously be
taken to symbolize Broadway, Hollywood or America, each of these settings
suffering their own black history. Astaire seems in the scene to be
a man in search of his identity, thus a man afflicted with skeptical
anxiety, and, after a series of false starts and dashed hopes, a path
to identity is found that travels through an encounter with, that is,
a dance with, a black shoeshine man. Cavell takes what follows not only
as Astaire's acknowledgment of an unjust heritage upon which his own
career relied, but as demonstrating his awareness that his own acknowledgment
of this will inevitably be contestable. The question will inevitably
be asked: what does such acknowledgment do? Or, rather, how
can it really undo anything that has already been done? But
does the inevitability of such questions necessarily make the gesture
inexpressive or false? We are speaking, after all, not about an apology
but of praise. To offer today, somewhat smugly, a "critique"
of such praise offered by Astaire risks missing the very poignancy of
the moment. Cavell locates this poignancy in the fact that the moment
of acknowledgment does not result in a movie in which these
two men co-star:

I have called it perfect in recognition and execution. I mean that it
demonstrates that these two can dance together - for a while - on an
equal basis, equally choreographed, equally standing, equally kneeling,
equally happy with the knowledge of their achievement in their joint
work, a momentary achievement of the Kingdom of Ends, a traumatic glimpse
of Utopia. But it demonstrates at the same time that they cannot leave
the scene of entertainment together, and cannot for no good reason. (78)

Rogin's reading contested Astaire's right, given his own history, to
offer praise. Cavell asks, on the contrary, whether we have the right
to withhold praise from Astaire on the grounds such acknowledgment produces
only momentary reconciliation, that trauma is only momentarily undone,
but the situation not reversed. This is to read the dance between these
two men not as illustrating an empty ritual but as posing a question
to us, that is, as a challenge to us to respond, to continue
the conversation, to continue to search for paths to a new future.

Not everything has happened in the Arcade, but something has; it
is my judgment that enough has happened there to warrant our consent
to the justice of it, that it is good enough to warrant praise. (82)

Good enough, that is, to provoke or invite a response that, for all
the ambivalence of the moment, celebrates the perfection aspired to
in it.

The significance of the scene derives in part from the media of cinema
and dance in which it is expressed, and which together, in Cavell's
accounting, add up to philosophy. It is not a question of measurable
improvements in race relations or the like, any more than the comedies
of remarriage are examples of moral perfectionism because viewing audiences
are measurably less likely to submit to divorce. Rather it is in the
infinitely subtle details of the ways in which they constitute "passionate
utterances" that praise for these films should either be offered
or withheld. "Passionate utterance" is the name Cavell gives
to a species of performative expression devoted, precisely, to perlocutionary
rather than illocutionary effects. Whereas performative (illocutionary)
utterances do what they say ("I pronounce
you husband and wife"), perlocution refers to all those things
that utterances do without what they do being necessarily contained
in what they say ("I love you"). Perlocution, with its
potentially infinitely proliferating consequences, is what Austin deliberately
excluded, more or less, from his consideration of performatives, a limit
that Cavell finds catastrophic (172). A clue to the complexities, difficulties,
threats, risks, and possibilities contained in passionate utterances
is indicated by Cavell's concise account of the specific difference
they name:

A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of
law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation
to improvisation in the disorders of desire. (19)

It was stated earlier, without offering any grounds for the assertion,
that cinema has, perhaps, a privileged place in the democratization
of moral perfectionism. The justification for this assertion would be,
in part, technological: the nature of the medium itself as bearer and
inventor of a tradition, which is equally to say, the constitution of
a public for whom cinema might offer something worth inheriting.
Film, dance, and philosophy tend, at their best, to embody perfect examples
of passionate utterance, that is, moments of expressiveness capable
of challenging us to a change of heart. We might say, then, that the
challenge posed implicitly in every case of such utterances is how to
marry perfection with "improvisation in disorder." This is
the definition and the mystery of desire itself. The irreducible presence
of skepticism today threatens such a challenge with the possibility
it is no longer audible or can no longer be taken up. What is to be
made, for instance, of the fact that the films posing this challenge
are nearly all half a century old? Yet one hope by which we might guard
against this threat lies in the possibility of finding the means of
praising, for example, Preston Sturges, Fred Astaire, or Stanley Cavell.

Daniel Ross
Monash University, Australia.

[1] Cf., Cavell, In Quest
of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago &
London: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 106–9.